The Other Side of Sleep
15A, 93 minutes ***
The Other Side of Sleep, an assured but demanding debut from Irish director Rebecca Daly, plays like a strange dream. From the moment it opens, we are not sure if we are awake. The woman at the centre of the story is called Arlene, and she also has trouble figuring this out. She’s played by Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who has the formidable task of making her character seem as clueless as we are.
Arlene lives in a small apartment in an Offaly town. Everything is not as it seems. When she wakes up one morning, all the furniture in her apartment has been rearranged into a heap by the door. She has cuts and bruises and blood under her fingernails and doesn’t know why. Arlene appears to be sleepwalking at night, and her excursions leave her soporific at the factory where she works by day. Campbell-Hughes’s eyelids are heavy. Her face is raw without make-up. She has a thick jaw and a small mouth that makes her look like she is swelled with secrets. She stares out at you from under a harsh-cropped fringe with the deadest eyes you ever did see. Trouble lies deep in her soul.
Daly sets out to examine the world of Arlene on strict terms. She crafts her film in the same vein as the works of the acclaimed Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel, using an almost wordless, visual style that is subjective and withholds information. The effect is psychological and mysterious. Clues are planted for us to piece together. A young local woman on the edge of the town has been murdered. Does Arlene suspect herself? She certainly behaves like it.
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Daly fills up the film with suggestion, opening with a dreamy sequence in which Arlene and another young woman lie together like sisters on crisp white sheets. It’s a gorgeous sequence, until we realise the other girl is dead. During the day, Arlene begins to drift into the dead woman’s world. She visits the grieving family and becomes romantically involved with her boy racer boyfriend (Sam Keeley). She arranges newspaper headlines about the case into a collage. Is she searching for clues to unlock unconscious memories? You begin to suspect she’s had some sort of trauma, even though the film does its best to suggest otherwise.
Arlene is the kind of woman you would have to shake to get words out of. When she talks, it is strange and stilted. You would also have to shake the director to get her to make an obvious move. In one scene, we watch Arlene walk into a storeroom and the empty shot is held until it is unnerving. Ordinary moments are infused with strangeness. In this depiction, rural Ireland would give you the creeps. One spectacular image of a car travelling through a forest could be an engraving for a Grimm brothers fairy tale. The background throbs with David Lynch-style, microphone-in-a-wind-tunnel sound effects.
The cinematographer Suzie Lavelle shoots the film in cold blues, and the world evoked is a netherland of numb feeling. Daly withholds so much that she expertly evokes Arlene’s mental dislocation. Arlene wanders vaguely through a nightclub and begins to resemble Morvern Callar, the eponymous and confused hero of Lynne Ramsay’s second film.
The Other Side of Sleep, though, is best seen alongside Martel’s The Headless Woman; both are shot in a similarly mysterious style and involve a woman in a daze concealing from herself the knowledge of some trauma.
This kind of film-making is a high-wire act and The Other Side of Sleep stumbles in its placing of clues. There is a delicate line between being subtle and being wilfully obscure and when the film makes a play for a twist, even the most attentive viewers could miss the beat.
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A challenging, high-end arthouse film, then, and a daring debut. If its jigsaw-puzzle plotting is unsatisfactory, it is ultimately a ruse. Here, the meaning of the film is to be found in the way it is constructed: through its numb, unknowing gaze we come to experience Arlene’s psychological state — her struggle to process what she is feeling. We come away knowing the dislocating power of grief, how it can disembody us from ourselves.
Arlene barely knows what goes on inside her head. Many of us sleepwalk through our lives like this, too.
With The Other Side of Sleep, Daly joins a new wave of Irish female film-makers. Directors such as Juanita Wilson, Margaret Corkery, Mira Fornayová and Carmel Winters are making highly personal arthouse films that, bravely, show little interest in commercial considerations. The sisters are doing it for themselves.